This Means War…

I came home from a weekend away to discover that mice had moved into the kitchen during my absence. I missed the first significant clue because I had a bag of fly predators on the counter, and thought the droppings were eggs that had fallen out of the bag.

I guess maybe an unrelated sidebar is necessary here… When you live on a ranch in the mountains, with a stagnating pond and several manure-producing mules, flies are a serious issue in warm weather. Every month, a company sends us a bag of fly predator eggs. Once they start to hatch, I release them in the manure piles in an attempt to curb our summer swarms. I leave them on the kitchen counter so I can keep track of their hatch, because if I miss it, they drill out of the bag and create a mess.

Which is what I thought might have happened that morning. There were no holes in the bag, but I still didn’t put two and two together. (Maybe I need to take a course in scatology? I seem to keep misidentifying animals based on their poop!)

When I got home for work, the counter was COVERED. It must have been some party. And sure enough, when I opened the pantry cabinet, there was food and droppings everywhere. And in the cooking utensil drawer, a nest.

SIGH.

My first thought was to bring in Bobcat to take care of it for me. The problem with this is that the cats are not allowed in the house, so when they do come inside, they are nervous. I put her right in the drawer with the nest, but she immediately jumped out and ran to Blue’s pillow. Stupid cat is really smart. She has watched the dog come into the house every night and go straight to the pillow to sleep, so she clearly equated it with an “animal safety zone,” kind of like free-base in a kid’s game of hide-and-seek. She wouldn’t leave it to hunt for me.

Strike one.

It was already 10pm, and the mouse traps were in our storage shed, a quarter mile and three locked gates away. I decided to wait until morning to deal with it, and sat down to watch some news. Only to jump up again less than three minutes later when a mouse popped out of the wood stove next to me and ran across the floor.

I had been wondering how the damn thing got in the house in the first place, and would never have figured on this. My new roommate was channeling Santa Claus, coming in from the barn roof by shimmying down the inside of the stove pipe. From there, full-on Parkour free running style, it tumbled across the floor, somersaulted up the broom handle, and back-flipped onto the countertop.

Okay, maybe some of that was my wine-induced imagination, but still!

There was no avoiding it, so off to storage I went. I armed the traps with peanut butter and went to bed.

The next morning brought no resolution. It had completely ignored my offering, and instead dragged off one of the rattlesnake tails from the windowsill. (If you have already accepted the existence of fly predators on the kitchen counter, you have no right to start judging me now!)

Strike two.

Clearly, the mouse expected hard-core protein to sustain its massive quantities of output on the kitchen counters. So the next night, I added a piece of dog food to the top of the peanut butter.

The next morning, it was more challenging to piece together what had happened. It appears the mouse had catapulted itself into a hanging basket, where it ate into a bag of BLT dip mix (bacon bits all over the counter), and then it lowered itself over the mouse trap like Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible and removed the dog food from the peanut butter without disarming the trap.

Strike three.

THIS MEANS WAR…